Nothing Is As Encouraging As This | The Freedom of Contempt

Ryan Holiday· Host0:00

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world. Why did Marcus Aurelius write his Meditations? It wasn't for an audience or to practice his Greek. After all, he was already pretty accomplished in those areas. Instead, we should think about what was going on around Marcus while he was writing it. Conflicts threatened just beyond the border. Economic troubles shook Rome's foundations. A plague had ravaged the nation's populace, and that's not even mentioning all the political corruption and the backstabbing and the chaos within palace walls. And yet Marcus doesn't seem to mention any of these events or his reactions to them. Instead, Marcus Aurelius explores himself in the pages of Meditations. He spends all of Book 1 reflecting on what he's learned from various influential individuals in his life. Debts and Lessons, as it's titled, is 17 entries spanning 9 pages and more than 2,000 words, nearly 10% of the book. And there's the fact that almost every page after it contains a quote, a story, or a reference to some bit of ancient philosophy. This seems a little odd, doesn't it, that the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet, was staying up at night exploring the idea of virtue